There are a few who earn the Medal of Honor and most civilians will never really understand what they endured to earn it.
Now they have a chance.
And I might just take it.
The sheer emotional power of the unpoliticized stories of eight Medal of Honor winners has taken a play from audiences as small as three in a little venue off from Arlington Cemetery to much larger audiences all around the world. The play titled Beyond Glory, performed by Stephen Lang, has been performed in the DMZ, Pearl Harbor, on an aircraft carrier, the Middle East and theaters in Europe. Most triumphantly, this year the play landed in New York's Roundabout Theater to much acclaim, the city whose theater district does not generally herald in powerful yet unpoliticized stories.
War will "sear its way into your mind and linger there forever after." That is also the description used by the very astute and perceptive theater critic Terry Teachout to describe Beyond Glory. Teachout also writes, "It is also one of the richest, most complex pieces of acting I've seen in my theatergoing life."
Men who earn the Medal of Honor experience some of the "richest, most complex" elements of human existence-- those moments, admidst the most hellish, bloodly and evil of circumstances, where a person's deepest character is unmercilessly crushed yet still rises above it to pull out the forces of courage and goodness from the gut of pain. Their stories stand on their own, yet Lang has clearly done justice to them with acting that has left men in tears.
Even if some of us cannot go to see the play, we can read the reviews with encouragement, which I provided links to above. Beyond Glory was also highlighted in an editorial today by Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger, titled Faith and Fiber. Henninger writes.
Last Saturday after he'd finished the matinee performance (the play closes a week from Sunday), I asked Stephen Lang: You've now spent several years with these eight guys; what do you think "Beyond Glory" is about. "For the longest time," he said, "I couldn't give it a name. I finally concluded that what binds these men is faith and fiber." Pretty simple. Faith and fiber.
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